Freebase: A Look at the Alpha
I got an invitation to the Freebase alpha and gave the service a spin over the weekend. Try this link if you are wondering what Freebase is all about.
As a more structured version of Wikipedia, Freebase could make the community-generated content easier to manipulate and would be a great resource for mash-up hobbyists everywhere. I found Freebase easy to use and already filled with data. It has been cleverly seeded with Wikipedia content to jump-start the user experience.
While I like the technology play, I am not so sure about the business model. The vision reads:
We aspire to be the center of a new Web by being a critical piece of infrastructure for businesses, organizations and people that want to use, present and manipulate information. We've started by building a working system and a single example application. Over the next few months, we will work to demonstrate our larger vision by integrating Metaweb into other applications, websites, blogs... anywhere there is a need for structured information. Right now only a few thousand websites are 'database driven'. If we succeed, millions will be.
We will be compared to Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and other information driven sites, but such a comparison misses our real purpose: we are trying to enable thousands of organizations and millions of people to build their own Web. Paradoxically, we are decentralizing the experience of information by centralizing the storage of it.
Sounds cool but I struggle to see how other people will be able to build websites off of a database that they can't control. For example, if I was creating a website about Spiderman comic books I would want to ensure that the content of my website was under my control. I would not want some random domain expert on Freebase changing the image resolution of all the cover art I was pulling into my site, for example.
Still, I like the idea and it is only in Alpha. With the right controls on the community, it might be the next big thing.
PS I'll take expertise over the wisdom of crowds any day.
